This time it’s the turn of older New Zealanders — what is sometimes known as the Silent Generation.
The youngest of them turns 80 next year, and we owe them heaps.
Like Civis, you might find generational labels confusing. It is hard to know why one is called X and another Z.
What are Millennials, and what about the infamous taunt in Parliament of Chloe Swarbrick (now Greens co-leader and born at the later end of the Millennials), ‘‘OK Boomer’’?
We as a species like to classify and label. This helps us make sense of the world and provides insight.
This can, though, lead to detrimental stereotypes and impede understanding.
This means we should treat the descriptions with a cellar full of salt when we toss around ideas about the generations.
For a start, leakage around the arbitrary cut-off dates is apparent.
However, we cannot deny different generations grew up in different eras. The milieu maketh the man or woman. We are shaped by shared experiences of history.
We are moulded, too, by individual character, family, class and economic and cultural circumstances. Some roots might be rural, some from the inner city.
Publicity usually is about later generations, whether characterised as snowflakes, latchkey kids, the avocado toast generation or whatever.
Nowadays, the Silent Generation’s birth range is 1925 and 1945. They precede the 1945 to 1965 Baby Boomers, those born after World War 2 in the two baby boom decades.
What a tough time the Silent Generation endured. The earliest arrived not long after WW1’s carnage scarred society.
The 1930s Great Depression was next. Then followed a worldwide conflict and many an absent father.
To generalise, this built the resilience that is so absent these days. There was no such thing as therapy.
Mental illness would have either been unrecognised or treated harshly. Harden up or else.
The boys, and sometimes girls — and the Baby Boomers — would have been commonly whacked and strapped at school and home. Youths would have been spared the pains and perils (and pleasures) of social media.
The ‘‘good old days’’ are often not so rosy.
No wonder the generation has been described as the stoic stalwarts. Waste not want not might be another portrayal.
Civis wants to pay tribute to them because of admiration for many gutsy, determined, uncomplaining, hard working and loyal women and men Civis knows and has known.
These ‘‘seniors’’ suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic. They were especially prone to lockdown isolation and social distancing and at higher risk of death.
Yet, a United States 2020 survey found they were navigating with stoic optimism. Just 23% reported concern with the psychological response.
The figure for Gen Z (born 1997 to 2012) was 56%.
Queen Elizabeth II (born 1926) was a prime exemplar of the archetypal qualities of the Silent Generation.
Talk about fortitude. The image of her swathed in black all alone in her pew at Prince Philip’s 2021 funeral at Windsor Castle still stings as evocative, melancholy and compelling.
Supposedly, this was the conforming generation. And there’s some truth to that.
Naturally, however, any blanket simplification ignores plenty of other threads.
James K. Baxter (1926), Ralph Hotere (1931) and David Lange (1944) hardly fit that image.
Nor do Andy Warhol (1928), Noam Chomsky (1928), Martin Luther King jun (1929), John Lennon (1940), Jimi Hendrix (1942) or Muhammad Ali (1942).
